Increase Vertical Jump by Improving Flexibility

Flexibility is a very important aspect of vertical jumping. Without it, you're just a stiff bunch of muscles. Flexibility will increase your strength and quickness and therefore increase vertical. It allows more powerful and full contractions of muscles providing more explosiveness. More flexibility will also help to keep you from sustaining injuries.

There are different ways of stretching your muscles: static and dynamic.

Static stretch would include normal stretching exercises by holding a certain position for about 20-25 seconds. One example would be a hang stretch where you simply cross your feet, bend over as far as you can and hang like a rag doll. Another would be a basic hamstring stretch where you sit with one leg extended and touch the toes of one foot.

Dynamic stretch would be actually doing a slow fluid movement such as slowly climbing steep steps to improvement movements in your hips. Another would be walking on your heels. This provides better balance in your lower legs by strengthening your anterior tibialis, which is the opposing muscle to your calf. These two types of stretching, static and dynamic, should be used in combination to achieve maximum benefit.

You should not do static stretches before your strength training, use dynamic stretcing to warm up your muscles. You should also flex after your workout to benefit you even more. Your muscles are warm and loose. This is a great time to maximize your flexibility, so after strength training perform static stretch but only after, never before strength training.

Dynamic stretching routine:
1. 20x lunge walks
2. 10x split squats
3. 10x leg kicks (each leg)
4. 10x side - to - side leg swings (each leg)
5. hand walks
6. 10x reverse lunges with twist